Life Supreme — Page 82
LIFE SUPREME 85 with the physical body; and within the spirit body lies the nucleus of eternal life-the soul. . During sleep the soul body detaches itself from the physical body and possesses full consciousness while it is on its travels. Before awakening it is drawn back into the physical body and normally the person has no recollection of what occurred; but sometimes a person does remember and is able to describe the experience. An anonymous gentleman wrote from Plymouth: 'I suddenly discovered that I was above my body looking directly down upon it. It was lying on the bed as clear as day. I had a good searching look at the face in particular and thought how strange it was to be now looking at myself just as other people see me. The experience was very real and definite indeed. . . nothing imaginary about it. I know that the experience was an actual fact' (The Phenomena of Astral Projection). Mr. Bruce Belfrage writes in his autobiography: 'I had a very serious illness from which I almost died. One night I left my body and saw it quite clearly lying motionless on the bed. It all seemed perfectly natural and experience proved to me, quite beyond doubt that the body and the spirit are quite separate, that the spirit, the real me, cannot be hurt and cannot die. . It is not only in natural sleep that people have out-of-the-body experiences. Patients have had them while under anaesthetics. Mr. . J. A. Findlay writes in his book 'Looking Back': 'A lady, whose honesty is unquestionable, told me that during the time she was under an anaesthetic, she felt herself standing overlooking her physical body on the operating table. She was interested to follow everything done by the surgeon and nurses, but, what impressed the surgeon when she told him of her experience afterwards, was the fact that she saw him do something to her inside that she could not have dreamed about. '. Cases of people who have had the experience of finding themselves outside their physical bodies while under an anaethestic are numerous. Similar is the case with the sick and dying and also those who are living normally in the best of health. These experiences are not figments of the imagination but absolute genuine occurrences.